I like Cantor, and have always supported him, but the Young Guns are way off the mark on this one and should follow the lead of American Action Network and pull out of the Indiana Senate primary race.

Politico has a copy of one of the mailers paid for by the Young Guns, and it is even worse than the other mailers sent by Lugar. While Lugar’s mailers were merely personal attacks on Mourdock, the Young Guns mailer pushes a big-federal-goverment agenda and demonizes those who recognize that the experiment of a federal education bureaucracy has failed.

Here’s one of the panels from the mailer (the others are at the Politico link):

Comments

More proof that the GOP establishment is just another wing of the Democratic Party. That is why we conservatives are constantly being blocked by Republicans as we take aim on Democrats. Defending the Department of Education with GOP donor money? Are they now going to defend Fannie and Freddie for the Dems too?

“However, there is one very important thing that the OWSers have right which we Tea Party folks are resistant too and that the OWSers are right about the 1%. It is impossible to get around these numbers:

Pasadena, I’ve read just enough of your comments (which is still not much, though) to ascertain that you have some coherent, useful elements of a critique linking Tea Party/OWS common interests, etc.; however, in the form you’re constructing this critique, you’re missing the boat in key ways.

To begin with, the 1 percent includes people who are not necessarily any more evil, or even greedier, than those in the 99 percent; it’s not a static income segment; and it includes a diversity of economic types, including some people who’ve benefited from close proximity to the “progressive” corporatist “welfare” infrastructure but many others who’ve not.

For example, I’m not a big fan of many Hollywood actors, producers, etc., but I don’t suspect that many made much of a share of their wealth as a result of maneuveurs initiated by the Fed, Wall Street welfare queens, or other federal/state “progressive” funding source.

Some 1 percenters, maybe pro athletes, speculators, trust fund babies, lucky souls, etc., skyrocket into the 1 percent, only to crash to earth within a few years or a decade; meanwhile, other 1 percenters only ascend to that level after four decades of heavy preparation, very hard toil, skimping, and so forth.

Most conservatives/libertarians have no issue with an entrepreneur or business owner who achieves great success largely without any milk from the corporatist teat – Do you?

Whereas we would have issues another approach used by the type who never makes into the 1 percent – maybe he is in the top 3 percent or only the top 10 percent – but who makes much of his money by his close proximity to big government – various tax credits and grant programs,$120K/year technocrats, and so forth.

One of the biggest problems with OWS is how superficial are their ideas. As a conservative, you should know better than they do.

It is best to construct your political positions around ALL of the facts. Facts are not truth. Knowledge is not wisdom. The worst lies are built around carefully selected facts with the intention of “proving” something that isn’t true. That is Ragspierre’s specialty and why he got banished from Michelle Malkin’s blog. Beware to all who believe that he is a conservative.

1. I interact with Rags but not with Phil so I don’t claim to be objective.

2. That said, I wish you two would knock it off. This stuff is not helping the site. If you can’t have a civil disagreement, I suggest you ignore each other.

3. If you seek targets for your choler, there are obvious (IMO) ones on this board.

4. I’ll repeat an ongoing request to the site owner: it would be helpful to be able to search the site by commenter. National Review Online offers that capability to registered users. I’d like to be able to track my own comments, and the comments of people whose opinions I respect—and the comments of people whose legitimacy I doubt.

Um, do I really want to stroll between two duelists, murmuring sweet reason? 😉

I’ll say this much: to bring an opponent’s motives into it is a major escalation of a debate.

I’ve done that myself when I wrote that some vitriolic denunciations of Romney could be pretexts for underlying anti-Mormon bigotry. One reason I’d like to be able to search this site by commenter name is to check whether the long-term record supports my suspicion.

I think it’s more a showing that our political situation in this country is more about appealing to stupid emotivist positions than considered policy judgements. (Another way to say this is “Bread and Circuses!!!”).
So to scare away supporters from your opponent, you convince people that the free flow of money from the Government will be stopped for them.
It saddens me that we’re too busy trying to get ours now that we’re willing to screw over every future generation.

“The only way to redress the income imbalance is by implementing policies that are oriented toward reversing the forces that caused it. That means letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy and adding money to some of the programs that House Republicans seek to cut. Allowing this disparity to continue is both bad economic policy and bad social policy. We owe those at the bottom a fairer shot at moving up.”

Now, I pointed out to you that was a Collectivist meme, and gave you the chance to explain why you recommended the piece without any exception.

My challenge for those who would defend the Dept. of Education is this: let’s try eliminating it for two years. At the end of two years, if we find a part of the DoE that we can’t live without, we’ll reinstate funding for that at whatever level you like.

I’d do the same for the Department of Energy, HUD and Commerce. Kill their funding and figure out what their useful parts are.

There’s a joke about how you reduce the size of the federal government in Washington: you wait until the next severe snowstorm, and broadcast an appeal for all the ‘non-essential’ workers to stay home.

“Conservatives need to consider the ominous prospects of expanding federal power over education. Federal funds for character education may sound fine now, but imagine what that might mean under, say, a “Hillary” administration. Before trading a vast expansion of federal authority for a bipartisan photo-op, the new administration should take a lesson from President Reagan.

While politics prevented Reagan from delivering on his promise to abolish the Department of Education, he at least slowed the growth of the federal agency to 5 percent annually throughout his administration.

More important, Reagan understood the proper role of the federal government in education: “Education is the principal responsibility of local school systems, teachers, parents, citizen boards, and state governments.” Adhering to this principle, Reagan sought policies that “insure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children.”

While focus group politics have frightened President Bush away from even mentioning the words “abolish” and “education” in the same sentence, the new administration has an opportunity to enact a positive federal program that empowers parents and lets the states call the shots on new spending. Again, the answer lies in Reagan’s playbook.”

Repeating the failure of GW Bushco years of Republican majority rule (2000-2006) is the definition of insanity.

Let’s repeat the winning solution for the benefit of Eric Cantor’s Young Guns:

Exactly. Even to the I’m-lost-without-the-government victim look on the kid in the image.

2. Vote for Lugar and Get Free Stuff

That’s a Republican message? Lugar should have been outed (and ousted) a long time ago.

3. Cantor looks like someone I knew who got ahead by being glib and hard-edged without any defining accomplishments: all but failing upward. I’ve kept that resemblance in mind when hearing criticism of the man, but as time passes I’m forming the impression that there is something to claims that the man is an ambitious empty suit.

For example, I just went to his campaign site to check out the Issues page. Nada.

I have my own personal copy of Lugar’s latest waste of money displayed in the Professor’s post. Excuse my French accent, but it is a piece of sh*t. Everything about the flyer says “DESPERATION.”

Referring the reader to Mourdock’s website, the mailer says that Mourdock’s severe budget proposal would cut Indiana out of $1.222 billion in the federal dole for educational purposes. Actually reading the Mourdock site, I find that the candidate supports Rand Paul’s 5-year balanced budget proposal which would eliminate the Department of Education while maintaining the Pell Grant program at 2008 levels and returning control of education back to the states. Lugar’s piece of you-know-what claims that Indiana loses $818 million in Pell Grants alone, so two-thirds of the Lugar claim is false. The balance should be easy to overcome if we quit funding the US Dept of Education and its $50 billion annual budget. BTW, Secretary Duncan told Congress that his department also committed an additional $70 billion under the Recovery Act!

The last page of the flyer contains a box which says:

“INDIANA VOTING FACT — VOTE MAY 8TH
Indiana does not have party registration. You simply need to show up at your polling location on May 8, 212 to vot for Senator Dick Lugar in the Republican Primary.“

“Saw that you’re attacking Mourdock for wanting to eliminate the federal Dept. of Education. Surprised you don’t want to do it too, since there’s NOTHING in the Constitution authorizing the feds to have anything to do with education. That’s reserved to the states, or to the people. Perhaps you may have read that phrase someplace before?”

Will be seeing Eric in a couple of weeks – think I’ll ask him about this. I’d like to see the federal gummint to get OUT of all the stuff the Constitution does not authorize them to do – not only education, but health and welfare as well. Then we can discuss the other stuff.

In the book “Young Guns“, co-written by Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, Cantor personally wrote in Chapter One of the book:

I remember the moment I realized my party had lost its way. It was on the morning of November 6, 2005. I opened the Sunday paper and saw the cover of Parade magazine. It featured a full color mock-up of the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska, the bridge that was to become the national symbol of an out-of-control Congress drunk on pork barrel spending.

As Richard Mourdock is likely to keep reminding us in his political ad (or maybe it is the Club for Growth ad for Mourdock), Dick Lugar voted for the “Bridge to Nowhere” legislation in the Senate. So what is Eric Cantor really trying to do here?

I can’t believe the “Young Guns” actually saw this mailer ahead of time, they must have just hired someone to run the PAC and favor this or that candidate, without setting forth policy limitations.

Education is one of the most wasteful federal departments. It is more of a shovel of money to teachers’ unions than any benefit to the students. Adult literacy has been declining since DOE was founded! In the decade of the ’90s, a 2001 audit found they couldn’t account for over $100 billion – nearly 10% of their budgeted funds for the decade. It just . . . disappeared.

It should be high on the list of departments to eliminate in any time of fiscal austerity. Cantor’s group should know this.

Mourdock has vowed to eliminate the Dept of Education? So did Reagan. Unfortunately Reagan wasn’t able to keep that promise; but I thought it was still standard Republican policy; doesn’t Cantor at least pay lip service to it?